In the early 2000s I arrived at graduate film school in Moscow thinking I would be surrounded by brooding lovers of avant garde Soviet cinema, devotees of the evasive spiritual allegories of Tarkovsky or the high-art agitprop of Sergey Eisenstein. To my surprise, most of my mature co-students—many of whom were from outside Moscow, as well as from the Baltics, the Caucusus, and Ukraine—were more interested in imitating the bittersweet psychological dramas of the late Soviet era. The films they loved were quietly anti-Soviet in that they shunned great power narratives in preference for private stories about love and friendship. …read more
Source: The American Interest
